In the fourteenth century the central tower was at
last completed, but it ceased to exist in 1749.
Indeed, the resources of Rochester seem to have been
small after the third quarter of the thirteenth century.
They had no Lady Chapel and when one was provided it
was contrived out of the south-west transept.
Later the north aisle of the choir, always dark on
account of Gundulph’s tower, was heightened and
vaulted and lighted with windows. Later still,
similar Perpendicular windows were placed in the old
nave, the Norman clerestory was destroyed and a new
one built, together with a new wooden roof and the
great western window was inserted. In 1830 Cottingham,
and in 1871 Scott, worked their wills upon the place
under the plea of restoration. Little has escaped
their attention, neither the beautiful Decorated tomb
of Bishop Walter de Merton (1278) nor that of Bishop
John de Sheppey (1360). The best thing left to
us in the Cathedral and that which gives it its character
is the great western doorway with its sombre Norman
carving of the earlier part of the twelfth century.
The nave is also beautiful and the crypt is undoubtedly
one of the most interesting monuments left in England.
Of the Priory practically nothing remains but a few
fragments.
[Illustration: Rochester]
Doubtless Chaucer and his company did not leave the
great church unvisited nor fail to look curiously,
nor perhaps to pray, at the shrine of St William,
for they, too, were travellers and pilgrims. But
the spectacle in the little city which it might seem
most filled their imagination, as it does ours, was
not the Cathedral at all, but the great Keep which
stands above it, frowning across the busy Medway.
Nothing more imposing of its kind than this great Norman
Castle remains in England. Having a base of seventy
feet square, and consisting of walls twelve feet thick
and one hundred and twenty feet high, it still seems
what in fact it was, almost impregnable by any arms
but those of the modern world. Its great weakness
lay always in the matter of provision, but it was
perfectly supplied with water, by means of a well
sixty feet under ground, in which stood always ten
feet of water. From this well a stone pipe or
tunnel, two feet nine inches in diameter, led up to
the very roof, access to it being given on each of
the four floors into which the keep was divided within.
These apartments one and all were divided from east
to west by walls five feet thick, so that on each
floor there were two chambers forty-six feet long by
about twenty feet in breadth. That this enormous
keep is the work of Gundulph and contemporary with
the Tower of London, there seems to be no reason to
doubt. Of the great part it played in English
history I have already spoken. But even in ruin
it impresses one as few things left to us nowadays,
when everything we make is so monstrous in comparison
with the work of our fathers, are able to do.
To stand there on the platform a hundred and twenty
feet in the air and look out over the Medway crowded
with shipping, ringing, echoing with factories on
either shore, to see the great ships in the tideway
and the fog and smoke of Chatham and its dockyards
down the stream, is to receive an impression of the
fragile, but tremendous, greatness of our civilisation
such as few other places in South England would be
able to give us suddenly between two heart beats.
